Artisan luthier marks 35 years of producing handcrafted guitars

BY BRUCE NEWMAN San Jose Mercury News

Sunday

Jul 31, 2011 at 12:01 AMJul 31, 2011 at 1:00 AM

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — The philosophical riddle is posed so often it has grown mossy with cliché: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? It turns out the answer is yes, it makes an amazing sound, although the eruption of this joyful noise might not occur for centuries, when it is sliced into pear-shaped tones at the Santa Cruz Guitar Co.

Just as Michelangelo believed every block of stone had a statue hidden inside, craftsmen in Santa Cruz who make artisanal acoustic guitars crave fallen timber for its distinctive timbre.

“Flavors, colors on an artist’s palette, that’s what we’re creating,” said Richard Hoover, whose groundbreaking guitar company is preparing to observe its 35th anniversary.

By harvesting rare rosewood from Brazilian forests cut down in the 1920s and 100-year-old mahogany planted for Britain’s Royal Navy — a reverberating echo of empire — Hoover has indulged the “scientific romance” of a boutique guitar-making movement he himself carved out.

For the company’s birthday celebration, Hoover is making plans for a series of guitars using locally grown wood that gives new meaning to the term “vintage.” He has a piece of California sycamore — now a 6-inch thickness of board, just 30 inches long and 10 inches wide — that fell into the San Lorenzo River and washed downstream to Santa Cruz. During a recent excavation for new townhomes, the log was unearthed from 30 feet of silt, where Hoover thinks it was buried 5,000 years ago. “We’ll probably make five guitars from that,” he said.

The company produces fewer than 700 handcrafted acoustic guitars a year. The company’s 13 luthiers are all men, so at times the workshop resembles a religious order of extremely handy monks. Handiest of all is Hoover, who set out to become a singing cowboy — a guitar slung over his shoulder like a bandoleer — and instead became high priest to the “unplugged” generation. He and his luthiers make “sustainable” instruments that are played by pre-eminent pickers such as Bill Frisell, Brad Paisley and Elvis Costello.

The company’s breakthrough came in the early ’80s, when guitar god Eric Clapton saw a small ad for Santa Cruz Guitars in a Cupertino-based enthusiasts’ magazine called Frets, and he ordered one. “You bypass years of trying to establish credibility when Clapton plays your guitar,” Hoover said.

At 60, with ponytail, full beard and glasses, Hoover bears the unmistakable markings of a man who chose to come to Santa Cruz, which happened after he ran away from home once and then left for good at 17. He picked up the guitar himself when he was 13. “To impress a girl,” he said. “That’s why we all picked up guitars.”

The first time he took one apart, there was no written information on how to build one by hand, so Hoover consulted texts on violin-making and became a self-taught luthier at 16. That taught him how to use the wood to manipulate sound. “It’s almost like composing a chord on a piano,” he said, sniffing at bigger competitors such as Martin and Taylor Guitars that make as many guitars in a day as his shop turns out in a year. “Making pre-sized components is like throwing rocks at a piano. You don’t know what kind of sound you’ll get.”

About 65 percent of Santa Cruz guitars are custom-made, and despite an average price of $5,000 — some of the rare-wood instruments range as high as $10,000 — if you put your order in today, the wait will be a year. Hoover and his team took 2½ years to get the company’s 30th anniversary showpiece just right, producing an instrument of such sculptural artistry that it is valued at $240,000. Santa Cruz doesn’t sell directly to the public, but Hoover welcomes pilgrims to his sawdust seraglio, where a 1-year-old coyote mix named Maria lopes warily past black guitar cases with people’s names taped to them, which are everywhere.

Hoover is never sure where the trail he blazed will lead next. Right now, there’s a brownstone in the Bronx that’s full of mahogany and a huge wine vat made of old-growth redwood just reclaimed near La Honda. Hoover thinks the wine barrel would make spectacular guitar tops, producing tasty notes of berries, vanilla and Dylan, with a finish that is totally unplugged.

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